Wanderings: Flashback

Thursday, June 28, 2007

Flashback

Well, 1 year ago today my brother and I were just leaving Oregon and crossing into Idaho after just over 600 miles of riding. We had ridden down the coast, then over the Cascades, one of the climbs we rode over was about 14 miles in length and had a vertical gain of around 3,700 feet we would find out later. Riding something like that is tough enough, but doing it after already riding 50 miles that day pulling over 50 lbs of gear behind you....then it really starts to hurt. We ended up camping just off the road at the top of the pass, only to decend a few miles the next morning and find a free campground....we had similar luck all throughout the summer!!! We then rode through lots and lots of nothing for the rest of Oregon along Highway 20. The only place we could really camp were at rest areas because there wasn't anything else other than sand and rocks. One day we stoped for water at a resturant that a family ran along highway 20 and after loading up on some food we got talking and found out that their nearest neighbor was over 50 miles away!! The riding on Highway 20 was ok except for all the retired old folks driving gigantic motorhomes towing a trailer, a truck, a hummer, a golfcart, and who knows what else. It just annoyed us that you can drive one of those with a normal drivers license, but you need a CDL for a semi, when some of the motorhomes were far longer than any semi. Too bad our encounters with motorhomes didn't really improve throughout the trip, we just got more and more desentisized to it.

Anyway, we had our hottest day of the trip on our last day in Oregon....110 degrees actual temperature. We would be coasting down hill and feel like we were in an oven.. So we stoped for some dairy queen, then hit up a small city pool to cool off.....and ended up sleeping in some baseball stands for the night and hiding from a HUGE thunderstorm.....little shady....but we're dirtbags remember.

We started a competetion as we crossed into Idaho, we would have state line sprints.....Stephen won the sprint to Idaho....

The only problem we had with crashing in rest stops was dealing with the sprinkler systems. Remember, it's the desert, and they like green grass in the rest stops so every night they put tons and tons of water in order to grow grass in the desert. So each night we would carefully search for all the sprinkler heads within range of our tent and cooking stuff and then either shove a shoe over them, or park our trailers/bikes on them so they couldn't spray us. We figured out that we had to do this after we were abruptly woken up after a long 110 mile day when I got a good steady stream of water right down my sleeping bag!! We never made that mistake again.

Here are a few pictures that jar my memory.